For White House, It’s Still the Economy. Stupid?

President Barack Obama meets at Canter’s Deli in Los Angeles, July 24, 2014, with, from left, Kati Koster, Aaron Anderson, Joan Waddell, and Katrice Mubiru, on the final day of a three-day West Coast trip. The four wrote to the president about issues that included education, military veterans resources, and the economy.

Associated Press

A popular saying around the Obama White House during the economic crisis in 2009 was: If you’re not talking about the economy, you’re not relevant. That still seems to be the driving mantra in the West Wing.

President Barack Obama has pressed ahead with economic events this past week despite the cascade of high-stakes overseas crises dominating the news. His weekly address last Saturday was about his economic “opportunity agenda.” On Thursday, he focused on closing a corporate tax loophole he said hurts the American job market.

In more private remarks, however, he made a risky argument: At a series of West Coast fundraisers, he said Americans are better off now than they were when he took office.

“Across the board, you could argue that we’re in a better place,” Mr. Obama said Wednesday at a fundraiser in Los Angeles. “But,” he told the supportive crowd, “You knew there was a ‘but,’ otherwise there wouldn’t be much of a call to arms here. The truth is that people across the country still feel anxious.”

It’s the kind of remark, however couched, that Mr. Obama’s critics are likely to use to build the case that he’s out of touch and employ against Democrats running in the November elections.

Mr. Obama’s “better-but” explanation isn’t echoed by some of his fellow Democrats. Hillary Clinton, for instance, has been offering a far more downbeat portrait of economic conditions.

And so it’s been since Mr. Obama has been in office. The White House has always struggled with how to balance positive economic signs and the widespread feeling among Americans that life isn’t getting better.

Even now, with the unemployment rate down to 6.1% in June, White House officials are still scratching their heads about why growth measures, such as GDP, aren’t as positive.

“Although the economy has done well in the aggregate, for the average person it feels as if incomes, wages just haven’t gone up; that people, no matter how hard they work, they feel stuck, and that’s not an illusion,” Mr. Obama said at a fundraiser Tuesday in Seattle.

Another shift in Mr. Obama’s economic argument this year is his use of the phrase “economic patriotism” to describe his agenda. In advocating Thursday for a change to the corporate tax rule, he called it an “unpatriotic tax loophole.”

In an interview with CNBC on Thursday, Mr. Obama said: “if you’re basically still an American company but you’re simply changing your mailing address in order to avoid paying taxes, then you’re really not doing right by the country.”

Mr. Obama’s message on the 2014 campaign trail has shifted from the one he delivered when campaigning for re-election in 2012 when he argued that the economy was on the right trajectory, even if some people were struggling, and Americans should re-elect him to keep it going in that direction. Now, with the country is in a similar place, his message to voters is: Don’t get cynical. As he told donors in Seattle, “When people get cynical, they withdraw.” (Read: They don’t vote.)

That’s one of the White House’s biggest concerns in the November elections, despite the president’s effort to make the case that Americans are better off now than they were five years ago.

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